In the course of a visit to Denmark last week, I opted for an evening of “social dining” — eating with strangers — in an old palace on a Copenhagen canal. During dinner (cured beetroot and pollock accompanied by weirdly flavoured aquavit) I asked my neighbour Henriette, an organiser for the engineers’ union, what she thought of the prime minister, Mette Frederiksen.
“I like her. She makes us feel safe. She’s good at taking difficult decisions.” On what, for instance? “Immigration. I’m not the kind of person who doesn’t want foreigners in their country,” said Henriette, looking a bit embarrassed. “But Denmark is small.”
Frederiksen is the most popular political leader in Europe. Denmark has not seen a surge in the popularity of the far right. Both facts are widely credited to the hardline immigration policy of its otherwise left-wing government. So should the British government be emulating it?
Denmark and Britain both used to follow a “multicultural” approach to immigration — little focus on integration, lots of respect for minority culture. In both countries, it led to concerns of the sort Robert Jenrick referred to when he said “I didn’t see another white face” in Handsworth, Birmingham. In Britain it also led to the grooming gangs scandal, in part the consequence of excessive police sensitivity in dealing with immigrants.
Denmark has now gone to the other extreme. The core of its immigration policy is the “parallel societies” agenda. (They were originally designated as ghettos, but even for the straight-talking Danes that seemed a bit on the nose.) “Parallel societies” are areas in which at least half the residents are non-white. If one of those areas also has unusually high levels of crime, poverty and unemployment, then the government steps in, demolishing housing, moving people out and imposing higher penalties on crimes committed in the area.
The policy has been a success to the extent that the number of areas designated as parallel societies fell from 29 in 2018 to eight last year. Henriette approves, citing the contrast between Denmark and Sweden, where there are areas that are 90 per cent non-white, gang violence is rampant and the murder rate is higher than the rest of Scandinavia.
In theory, Britain has also moved away from multiculturalism. It has, for instance, introduced a language test for some visas and a culture test for citizenship. In practice, though, lots of integration initiatives — mostly voluntary — have added up to fairly little, as Dame Sara Khan’s report last year on social cohesion and extremism concluded.
Yet even if the British approach has had problems, it is hard to see ethnic cleansing as the solution. And demolishing residential property doesn’t go down well in a country that believes a chap’s home is his castle. Britons dislike heavy-handed social engineering.
Anyway, state intervention is not necessary to desegregate Britain. It’s happening naturally. Geographers at Queen’s University Belfast, who look at census data to see how ethnic groups are moving, found that they have become less segregated over the past 30 years. White areas are getting less white and other ethnic groups are mixing more with each other.
That’s not hugely surprising, since it has been happening for centuries. Spitalfields used to be full of Huguenots and then of Jews. There’s no sign of either group in the area these days, because they did well and moved out. Now the Bangladeshis who replaced them are dispersing too.
Prosperity thus discourages segregation; and compared with the rest of mainland Europe, immigrants tend to prosper in Britain. Educationally, all non-white groups except Afro-Caribbeans now do better than white Britons; in France and Germany as well as Denmark, immigrants do worse. In Britain, immigrants tend to be net contributors to the exchequer; on mainland Europe, they are net recipients of state funds. In Britain, the children of immigrants tend to rise up the earning scale; in France and Germany, they tend to fall.
Mainland Europeans thus have more of a problem than we do, which may tip the balance in favour of heavy-handed state intervention. They also tend to be more racist than Britain is, which may make them more willing to adopt explicitly racist policies. But numbers matter. The more immigrants there are, the harder integration becomes. In both Denmark and Britain, net migration peaked a couple of years ago — in Denmark, at 1 per cent of the population, and in Britain at 1.3 per cent. It has now dropped by more than half in both countries; and yet while immigration policy makes Frederiksen more popular, it makes Keir Starmer less.
Without carrying out ethnic cleansing in Birmingham, Starmer could take a lesson from Frederiksen’s more muscular approach. It’s partly about tone. Starmer clearly hates being tough on refugees, while Frederiksen is unapologetic, posting on Facebook a picture of herself with a cake with 50 candles, symbolising 50 restrictive measures on immigration.
Starmer also needs to make Britain a less attractive destination, as Frederiksen has Denmark. Refugee status in Denmark is now temporary, discouraging people who want to make a new life. Those who are not granted refugee status often have to stay in detention centres and are offered money to go home.
There is also scope for a show of strength from Starmer on the international front. A talented diplomat, he should lead the charge to reform the European Convention on Human Rights and the UN Refugee Convention, which constrain Britain’s ability to deal with small boats. If he fails, he should withdraw Britain from both.